Tag Archives: Moreton-in-Marsh

There are few things I love better than poking about in prehistoric Britain. Located near several of the Cotswolds’ most beautiful villages are one of England’s most charming megalithic sites, called the Rollright Stones. Not only are they magical, they’re surrounded by colorful stories to boot.

Because our vacation was free from the worries of driving on the left-hand side of the road, Ken and I arranged a taxi from the White Hart Royal Hotel in Moreton-in-Marsh to the Rollright Stones, which consists of three monuments: the King’s Men stone circle, the Whispering Knights burial chamber, and the King Stone standing stone. Each was built hundreds or thousands of years apart, between 3800 and 1500 years BCE.

We arrived in the midst of a drizzle, arranged for our driver to return in two hours, and followed the signs through the trees to the largest site, The King’s Men stone circle, where we stood beneath the trees and read the legend of the Rollright Stones from our guidebook.

The tale, which probably dates back to medieval times, goes something like this: A king and his army were marching through the Cotswold Hills when they were changed to stone by a witch—no doubt a wise woman who reasoned that the land was better off remaining as crop- and pastureland instead of becoming a battlefield. So, the crone turned the king into the lone-standing King Stone, his army into the King’s Men circle of stones, and his treason-plotting knights into the Whispering Knights standing stones. The witch then transformed into an elder tree, which supposedly still grows on the hill; if that elder is ever cut, the spell will break, and all the Stones will come back to life.

The King’s Men Stone Circle

The drizzle ceased, and we walked out into the open hilltop to a sweeping panorama of the Oxfordshire/Warwickshire countryside. And then we saw the beautiful King’s Men stone circle, the highlight of the Rollright Stones’ three sites. Dozens of pocked and craggy limestones—most less that six feet tall—stood in circular formation.

It was easy to see why they’re named for soldiers—many of the more upright stones did seem to have human shapes, although some of them were squat. Each stone possessed amazing character: each was weathered like an aged person’s face. In addition, the stones are covered by unique lichens in many hues—rust, ochre, burnt umber—and according to the info board about the circle, some of those lichens are 400 to 600 years old! The stones are surrounded at their bases by grass, moss, stinging nettles, and tiny field flowers.

Ken and I were roaming alone among the stones, admiring their topography, when we were joined by a quartet of vivacious girls who skipped five or six times around the circle counting the stones.

There’s another legend about the King’s Men stone circle: the stones are supposedly uncountable. There are 70-odd stones, but in places it’s almost impossible to tell where one stone begins and the other ends because they lie in a cluster. Other stones barely show above the ground and the tufts of grass. According to the story, if you count the same number of stones three times, you are granted a wish.

After the girls had raced around the circle, we overheard them declaring to their mums that they got the same count three times, so they were all making a wish.

After the group left, I began counting stones but was distracted when I looked into the stand of trees that grew in a horseshoe around the circle. In the shrubbery, something shiny and colorful caught my eye, and when I went to look, I discovered that it was clooties—scraps of cloth or other decorations—tied to the branches.

Clooties (also spelled “cloughties” or “clouties”) are a Pagan tradition for honoring trees and asking for healing, and they’re commonly found at sacred sites (like ancient standing stones) and healing wells across the UK and Ireland.

The Rollright clooties were made of ribbon, cloth, stalks of barley or wheat from the surrounding fields, daisy chains, and bits of colorful litter like candy and gum wrappers and a Pellegrino label that the makers probably cleaned up from the vicinity. I imagined that a Pagan group, celebrating Lughnasa just a few weeks before in early August, might have freshly decorated the boughs.

To give thanks for my regained mobility after hip replacement—which made it possible for me to travel to England for a walking holiday—I assembled my own clootie out of dandelions and a spray of leaves, and I tied them to a branch.

Last, I circumnavigated the circle again, counting the stones. I came up with 76, but didn’t have time to do a second or third pass; we still had two more sites to visit before our time was up, so I left it to the mystery.

I did, however, take a moment to try to envision the stones with no gaps between them. According to historical and archaeological documentation, the stones may originally have numbered about 105, all standing shoulder to shoulder—even more like a militia than they look now. Over the millennia, many of the stones have fallen, and some were carted away in the last millennia for use in building bridges and whatnot.

In modern times, the Rollright Stones have been used to exhibit modern sculptures, including Anish Kapoor’s Turning the World Inside Out, and for plays, notably Mark Rylance’s production of The Tempest in1992. The Stones are also regularly used for private wedding and naming ceremonies and other celebrations, according to the Rollright website.

The Whispering Knights

Just a short walk past pastures of grazing sheep are the Whispering Knights. This trio of upright stones is aptly named because the stones lean into each other, so it doesn’t take much imagination to picture them as disgruntled knights furtively colluding against the king.

In reality, the vertical stones originally formed a Neolithic portal-dolmen, with these upright stones supporting a capstone, or flat “roof.” Sometime between 3800 and 3500 BCE, builders constructed this portal to lead into a communal burial chamber, which was used for human remains well into the Bronze Age, according to the sign posted at the site.

Today the Whispering Knights are surrounded by an iron fence to discourage people from climbing on the stones and damaging them or the lichens that grow on them. The Knights gaze over the farm fields and stands of trees as far as the eye can see. People toss coins into the crevasses of one of the fallen stones—for luck I suppose. Or perhaps to insure that they will return to this lovely place.

The mysterious stones seem to have captured the imagination of people in the region for centuries: There’s an age-old story that on New Year’s Day, the three Whispering Knights hoist their rocky bodies and “walk” down the valley to the brook for a drink of water. The church bells of the nearby town of Long Compton are also supposed to inspire this migration. If ever there were three stones with human personalities, it’s these three.

Other local folklore includes this story: A local farmer wanted one of the largest stones to build a bridge over a stream. It took 24 horses to drag the stone down the hill, and one worker was killed on the way. Eventually the farmer got the stone positioned across the stream, but by the next morning it had flipped over onto the bank! Each time the farmer moved the stone into a bridge position, the same thing happened. Then the area crops failed, so the farmer and his friends decided to return the stone to its original position. This time it took only onehorse to drag the heavy slab back up the hill!

The moral of the story? Don’t mess with ancient megaliths—and never underestimate their power or majesty.

The King Stone

We walked back to the road and crossed, passed through a farm gate, and wandered up to the lone King Stone, which rises sinuously from earth to sky.

Its lovely curve isn’t how the stone originally appeared; its shape is the result of centuries of human vandalism, now hopefully curbed by an iron fence with arrow-shaped spikes at the tops.

According to the sign, 19th century drovers and visitors chipped off part of the stone as good-luck charms and to “keep the Devil at bay.”

Bad luck, if you ask me. In fact, it’s a criminal offence to damage any monument stones like this in Britain.

There’s something lonely and exposed about the solitary King Stone, which looks as if thousands of years of wind passing over the hilltop had unfurled solid rock, sending it sailing skyward into the mottled clouds. Or perhaps the presence of adjacent burial chambers and cairns contributes to the melancholy atmosphere.

Or, maybe it’s the scale of time at the Rollright Stones: We humans have a lifespan of a hundred years if we’re lucky, whereas the King Stone has been a sentry over these Cotswold hills for more than 3,500 years. The Whispering Knights have guarded their secrets for almost 6,000 years.

After two hours at the Rollright Stones—which slipped by in the blink of an eye—our taxi driver returned to whisk us along the country roads and back to our hotel, which has been operating as an inn since the 1600s. Such is time in the ancient lands of Britain.

The Motivation: After three major surgeries over three consecutive years to remove a noncancerous disease from my hip, I wanted to celebrate my recovered mobility by doing a walking tour.

The Inspiration: While recovering from my last surgery, I visualized walking from village to village in England’s rural Cotswold Hills. The green landscape there is filled with farmland, woodland, and villages dating to medieval and Tudor periods. Now it was time to make my dream come true!

The Company: My husband and I signed up with Cotswold Walks, a locally based company that offers a variety of long and short self-guided walking tours in the region. We chose the “Best of the Cotswolds” itinerary because it offered shorter distances (from 3.5 to 8 miles per day) with more time to go at a leisurely pace. And the villages looked stunningly gorgeous! All Cotswold Walks include accommodations in small inns and B&Bs (breakfast included), an up-to-date guidebook showing your route with detailed instructions, and transfer of one suitcase per person from inn to inn.

After two nights adjusting to the time change from Colorado to England, Ken and I headed out on the first leg of our journey: the 7.5-mile trek from Moreton-in-Marsh to Stow-on-the-Wold.

My heart was pounding, and I hadn’t even started walking yet. I was nervous about beginning with such a long walk. How tough would it be? Would we get rained on? We set off from the Market Square, made our way down the sidewalks and along a busy road, and then we turned off into tranquil farmland on The Monarch’s Way trail.

So we began navigating through field gates and kissing gates (?!) and across pastures inhabited by sheep and cows in England’s lush countryside.

Our guidebook, which included Ordinance Survey maps, was easy to follow. A typical instruction was: “With the field gate on your right, continue up the hill. Pass through another field gate and past Lower Keeper’s Cottage. Turn left (east) before the cattle grid and follow the Heart of England trail alongside the field boundary to a field gate.”

We met locals walking their dogs, as well as other Cotswold Walks hikers on the paths. (We could identify the latter because they were carrying the same white guidebook that we had, and when we struck up conversation, we found that they were all fascinating people.) Soon I was relaxed and smiling. I felt free and unburdened: I carried just my hiking poles, my iPhone, a notebook (because that’s essential gear for a writer) and a daypack with rain wear and snacks/water. And Ken did most of the navigating.

By the time we reached the picturesque village of Longborough, I was more than ready to rest my feet and stop for lunch at the Coach & Horses Pub and Inn. Lots of locals were congregating at tables or around the bar, catching up on the town gossip and enjoing a pint. We ordered bowls of soup and glasses of Cotswold Gold Ale, made at Donnington Brewery, the next village down the road.

We chatted with a couple of old-timers and we giggled at some of the bar’s signs: “Save water; drink beer” and “Nobody notices what I do until I don’t do it.”

A lively group of eight young women celebrating a baby shower rounded out the crowd.

Refreshed, we set out for the second half of the walk: first admiring the gardens and dry-stack stone walls of Longborough. We climbed up a hill with a huge muddy patch and looked back to see a manor estate in the distance. Think Downton Abbey.

We ambled through the farm of yet another country estate, across a ridge with views for miles, and then up a steep incline before arriving at a tunnel through dense trees. We felt like we’d walked into the set of The Hobbit.

At last we descended into Stow-on-the-Wold, right at tea time, and the tea shops along Sheep Street were packed with tourists; the Old Town Square was filled with buses and cars. (In medieval times it would have been filled with sheep, as wool was big business.)

I was bushed and couldn’t wait to get to our hotel, the Old Stocks Inn, where I took off my hiking boots, sank onto the bed, and elevated my feet—just to let the blood flow the opposite direction.

But I did it! I survived the first day of walking in the Cotswolds—my dream trip. My hip felt great; my left foot with its arthritic toe did OK. And after half an hour of rest—and a cup of tea in the room—I felt restored enough to walk around the Square. I was particularly interested in St Edward’s Parish Church, a typical Norman church with a stone, crenellated tower. Its north door is flanked by ancient yew trees, and it looks like it’s straight out of The Hobbit or a medieval fairy tale.

We were ravenous, and the historic Queen’s Head Pub in Stow-on-the-Wold was ideal. The sign was painted with red-haired Queen Elizabeth I’s portrait and was furnished in Tudor style with rough, blackened beams; stone and wood floors; hops hanging from the ceiling; mullioned windows, and an old man in his cap reading book while his dog yawned beneath the table.